


Downstairs, Where The Paperwork Lives (In Hell)

by Missiedith



Category: Actor RPF, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Character Death, Community: wrisomifu, Crack, Crossover, Gen, Round Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-10
Updated: 2007-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 14:30:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missiedith/pseuds/Missiedith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spike is stuck in a multiverse purgatory with far too much paperwork and a new found appreciation of stationery. PG for language only.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Downstairs, Where The Paperwork Lives (In Hell)

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by narrauko.
> 
> Written as part of the 2007 wrisomifu Round Robin. Contains oblique references to Stargate, Discworld, Supernatural and Marvel. Previous parts are locked to the LJ community, but all you really need to know for this part to make sense is as follows:
> 
> Tara is helping out on the Committee Ordained For The Assessment Of Qualification For Soul Ascendancy For Characters Exhibiting Moral Ambiguity in Fiction, before which fictional characters must stand when they die. Albus Dumbledore keeps dodging his hearing. Buffy dies in a car crash and is allowed go to Heaven after rather a lot of argument. Spike is mentioned as having to do some time in Limbo before he will eventually be allowed to pass on. Oh, and Tara met Tarzan in a waiting room and accidentally set him and some friends loose on the world. Also, she has an ice-pod thing that seems roughly equivalent to a BlackBerry.

“Does this one go under ‘Captain America’ or ‘Steve Rogers’?”

“Rogers, you ninny,” Spike replied. “Give me that.” He snatched the file out of the other man’s hand and leafed through it quickly. He’d decided fairly early on into serving his time that it was a thoroughly justified prerogative to be as intrusively nosy as he damn well liked. It broke up the monotony a little at least. A lot of the files seemed to be pretty open-and-shut cases, like this bloke Rogers, but every now and again he’d find one with some really down and dirty secrets. Even better when they belonged to those pretending to lily-white innocence.

“Stay out of my desk,” he warned Tom, before heading off down the Q-R aisle of filing cabinets. His duster flapped indolently behind him, and the fluorescent strip lighting did this especially unflattering glinting thing on his skin. Having consigned dearly departed Steve, or at least his horribly boring file, to his proper place in their records and posterity in general, Spike took a slight detour on his way back. He snuck a quick cigarette behind the _Jackson, D_ cabinets before deciding he’d left Tom unattended for long enough. With the care brought about by the full awareness of his own flammability and the fact that he stood in the middle of a room full of paper, he stubbed out conscientiously. The butt joined the pre-existing sizeable pile of cigarette butts, this being one of the few places Spike had found that allowed him to dodge the dimension-wide smoking ban. The _Jackson, D_ cabinets did have a certain reputation. Most avoided them if they possibly could.

He found Tom invading his desk as he’d expected, doing unholy things with his post-it notes and the stapler. This was quite possibly the only stapler physically present in this particular dimension and Spike had got his hands on it no less than five weeks ago. He was now well into the record-setting stage of continued ownership of the damn thing, and was on high alert for any and all threats to it.

Tom, on semi-permanent loan from Conspiracy &amp; Urban Mythology, did not count as anything even remotely resembling a threat. He wasn’t even fictional, just some actor unfortunate enough to come up against his very own identity-stealing evil alien. Apparently this was what happened when you were stupid enough to marry a scientologist. Sucked for Tom. The ‘real’ world sounded worse than any fiction Spike had come across. At Spike’s return, Tom promptly tipped himself out of the swivel chair into an undignified heap on the linoleum. He then crawled off at speed in a flurry of post-its.

“Ahem,” Spike coughed pointedly. Tom paused, and another post-it fluttered free. “Why yes, Spike, I do enjoy having my filmography written out in paper cuts across my testes,” Spike drawled in fair imitation of the nervous stutter Tom seemed to have developed since coming to work here. Just to let Tom know exactly what he was lining himself up for.

Tom came to the very sensible conclusion that the stapler wasn’t worth it, fished it out his underpants, and replaced it on Spike’s desk before recommencing his hasty scamper to the relative safety of his own desk.

Spike chuckled, once more content that there were worse people he could be stuck down here with. He settled in to tackle his own in-tray, fishing out the handful of internal memos that looked to be in danger of getting lost in the rest of the paperwork. Those dealt with, he put together a bunch of case files for some new arrivals, and then spent a few short moments drawing smiley faces on the stress-relieving squidgy foam ball all these jobs seemed to come with. He then spent some considerably more drawn-out and highly valued moments stabbing the faces repeatedly with an excessively sharp pencil, and life was good. Or unlife was good. Or purgatory, or damnation, or whatever the fuck it was his existence counted as now.

This was how Tara found him a little later as she stepped into the wide low hall, blinking slightly at just how vast and lonely a place it was. She waved over at Tom, who seemed even more disoriented and lost than he usually did, then perched herself carefully on the edge of Spike’s desk. “Hey.” She waited patiently for him to finish gouging out the smiley’s eyes.

“Hey,” he finally replied, putting away the pencil. He looked up. “Glinda! Beauty of beauties, how’s unlife upstairs?”

“Oh, you know,” she smiled. “Crowded. Long-winded. The usual. How about down here?”

“The very opposite,” Spike replied cheerfully, having spent long enough in the waiting rooms himself. “Did you hear Captain America kicked it?”

Tara shook her head with a small smile. “I must have missed him. Xander will be so sad.” Except, Xander was probably trying to deal with the death of one of his best friends instead. It couldn’t be easy carrying on that fight without Buffy, and she felt a flash of concern for Xander, Willow, and most of all Dawn. She looked up at Spike, hoping she didn’t turn out to be the one breaking the news to him. She spoke quietly. “I saw Buffy earlier.”

“I know, it’s ok. Her file’s getting pretty hefty, but I made sure it was all in order.” He was suddenly sombre, sitting back and spreading his palms on the desk. “At least she went up. Can’t believe the wankers even debated it, to be honest. No offence.”

“Well, you know what they’re like.” She couldn’t really believe it herself, but at least the end decision had been the right one. “She’s at peace now,” she offered, which had always seemed such a trite thing to say before she’d been made aware of how tiresome and convoluted the process could actually be.

Tara looked around awkwardly as Spike dug about for his pencil sharpener. Her gaze drifted over to where Tom sat, and she watched in dismay as he crumpled off his chair again as his shocked eyes met hers. But it seemed to be just the three of them down here, the only other desk empty. It was a quiet break from upstairs, even if she thought the lighting might eventually give her something of a headache. Something occurred to her.

“Spike?” she asked.

“Glinda.”

“What happened to your assistant?” That desk hadn’t been empty last time she’d been down here. “I thought you had some new kid helping you out?”

Spike paused in sharpening and scowled at the unpleasant reminder. “I chained her up just out of reach of the fake coffee dispenser.”

“Spike!”

“Glinda,” he replied once more, pacifically sharpening in short regular twists.

“Why? What did she do? Why would you…?” Tara fumbled for words, feeling stupid. This was Spike, after all, and he was down here for a reason. Over a hundred years of horrible reasons, in fact, but she’d really thought he’d changed.

He put the pencil down completely. “You want me to find her file? I’m sure she’s guilty of all sorts of things. Unspeakable bookwormish type things. You know, cheating on exams, backstabbing, oppressing the less well-educated. Sexual deviance after hours in the library. It’s not me on that committee, I didn’t stick her down here.”

“I meant what did she ever do to you,” Tara clarified, somewhat distressed.

“Oh.” Spike grimaced further. “Bitch tried to tell me I needed to be colour coding everything. Wouldn’t bloody shut up about it.”

Tara tried to work out exactly how she was supposed explain how much of an overreaction she thought chains might have been. “Um,” she started before stalling at the intense warning glare Spike was shooting her way. She looked about the room again at a loss, pausing as she took in the sheer immense size of the depressingly low-ceilinged hall. Row after row of filing cabinets stretched out into what she began to realise would most certainly warp into L-space, twisting to make room for a very real labyrinth of extra cabinets, hidden aisles, and even more case files. Spike had warned her not to go wandering in when she had first started visiting him, and now once again she got the impression that it would be very easy to step in and never make it back out. Not even her ice-pod would save her in there. Her headache materialised just thinking about it, the number of files stored here was truly beyond her comprehension.

Goddess. Colour coding the lot of them? It didn’t bear thinking about. “Um, ok,” she concluded rubbing her temples.

“Don’t worry about it,” Spike said, petting her hair with that surprising softness that turned up in him whenever she least expected it. “I took care of it.”

“Right.” Tara tried to feel reassured. “With the chains.”

Spike sighed. “I’ll send Tom in to fetch her out eventually, never fret.”

Hearing his name, Tom fell out of his chair again. Tara thought maybe she heard him whimpering quietly somewhere beneath his desk.

“Right,” Tara repeated once more. “Well. I have to drop off this file with you. They’re after _Dumbledore, Albus_, and I think we ended up with the file on _Dumbledore, Ariana_ instead. Sorry.”

She hopped off the desk as Spike started crisply on a fairly familiar monologue spanning topics as diverse as the buggery of camels and the inability of the majority of the committee to dress itself in the morning. But mainly he focussed on illegible file request forms, and the various forms of torture he could inflict armed only with two particularly sharp pencils and his stapler.

“I have to get back upstairs, Spike.” She hated to interrupt him, but she really did need to get going.

He paused. “Did you have anything to do with a disappearing room of sodding Victoriana by any chance?”

She froze guiltily. “No?”

“Thought as much.” He pointedly indicated the two whole boxes of paperwork dragged into being by this exploit, stacked currently at the foot of his desk. “Please don’t do it again, pet. Take care.”

Grinning apologetically, she left him to his tirade, waving to Tom as she left.

“…bureaucracy, I’ll give the fuckers bureaucracy. I’ll red-bloody-tape ‘em ‘til they’re begging in their best bloody handwriting, the tossers.” He ground to a halt abruptly and lit himself a smoke in outright defiance of the rules. With a sudden and eery wave of calm he marched off to the stacks, incorrect Dumbledore file in hand. “Yell if anyone shows up, Tom. Other than the soul-sucking scientologists of your paranoid imagination, I mean.”

Four aisles over he decided to go back for the stapler, slipping it lightly into his breast pocket. Tom looked at him shiftily. “And stay out of my desk, got it?” Spike reminded the man, who nodded his obeisance until he looked like he might give himself whiplash.

By the time he’d made it back to the _Jackson, D_ cabinets, he’d finished his first smoke and was lighting another. How one man had managed to generate quite this much paperwork he’d never understand, but it suited his purposes just fine. Spike cupped his hands to yell.

“Oi! Albus! Get your system-dodging transvestite self down here.” There was a distant pop of apparition from the far side of the hall, followed a little later by the soft thud of a man in a dress tripping over a particularly tough to navigate section somewhere in W. Eventually the wizard appeared from around a corner limping slightly.

“Spike, do you realise the refuse skip attached to W is actually overflowing? I mean, very literally, there’re a whole two aisles that are practically impassable with papers.” Albus was a little peeved. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected better, but having successfully navigated the perils of L-space the more physical obstacle had taken him completely by surprise.

“It’s a matter of some contention between management and myself, I’m afraid,” Spike explained. “I’m not having anything to do with the Winchester skip and they can’t sodding-well make me.”

Albus peered over his spectacles in time-honoured fashion, and he thought maybe the vampire had suddenly managed to hit a new shade of horribly deathly pallor. Or that may just have been the light.

“I do have rights, you know.” Spike spoke mostly to convince himself it seemed. He was increasingly coming to believe the only rights he actually had were those he was able to back up with threats of violence and the stapler, but overall the principle worked. He wasn’t going near that skip, and so far nobody else had volunteered for the job. “Anyway, we have business.”

“We do?” Albus enquired, offering forth his bag of assorted confectionary.

Spike dug about for a lollipop and handed Albus his sister’s file. “That bought you a few weeks, but eventually people are going to start asking questions. Especially now dear Ariana’s made her way back here.” He spoke around the lollipop, and it made a slightly odd clicking sound against his teeth.

“Management?”

“Management,” Spike confirmed. “You want your paperwork to stay lost it’s not going to be as cheap as the initial jolly old getting it lost in the first place service.” Spike watched Albus consider this, secure in the knowledge that right now the wizard needed him a lot more than Spike needed any single item he could think of to reasonably demand. He wasn’t entirely sure why Albus was going to such extreme measures to avoid facing the committee – his file hadn’t seemed any more circumspect than the usual generic white hat quibbles. Whatever his reasons, Spike had nothing but respect for their healthily brokered business arrangement.

Albus nodded thoughtfully. “What did you have in mind? Another stapler perhaps?”

As if this dimension would even allow the existence of more than one stapler, Spike scoffed. He’d have better luck finding a hole punch. “I want four wholesale boxes of these lollipops.” He demanded more realistically. “Just the blood flavoured ones, none of that brains flavoured crap. Then, two hundred Benson&amp;Hedges. A pair of those rubber finger thimble things for turning pages with.” He thought suddenly of Tara and how patiently she always listened to him curse. “And a kitten.”


End file.
